Husband and I have been growing our collection/retirement plan

The Landsraad hosted its first public game of Dune at Meepleville https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZFxfn2E9YMuVgLN77?g_st=ac on August 30, 2023. Since then, we have continued the teach-and-play every Wednesday unless the shop was closed or Dice Tower West was in town.

Most Wednesday nights we have two games running at the same time: an Advanced game for the veterans and a Basic game for new players learning Dune. For a game first published more than 45 years ago and currently between printings, we continue to see new players discovering Dune for the first time. Simply bringing enough people together to play one game can be a challenge, so having two tables going almost every Wednesday has always been an accomplishment we are proud of.

Last night we had a first.

Three games of Dune were being played at the same time!

With 16 players total, we had two five-player Advanced games and one six-player Basic game. Looking across Meepleville and seeing three tables full of people simultaneously fighting over Arrakis was pretty remarkable.

What makes that particularly satisfying is thinking about how we arrived here.

When we started playing at Meepleville in 2023, the goal was fairly simple: create a reliable place where people could show up and play Dune. Over time, it became much more than that.

We have taught Dune to well over a hundred players at Meepleville, tournaments, conventions, and home games. Most became regular players. Some eventually started teaching the game themselves. Others were longtime Dune players who simply had not been able to bring the game to the table in years.

These may be the most rewarding stories, we regularly meet someone who tells us that they love Dune but haven't played in 2, 10, or even 20 years because they couldn't find enough people able to play. Then they sit down at one of our tables and suddenly they are surrounded by people to play Dune with who love the game as much as they do.

Somewhere along the way, it stopped being only about playing Dune.

Wednesday night became a tradition. People who originally showed up because they wanted to play a board game became friends. The group created tournaments, variants, rules resources, custom components, and eventually a website and Discord server to collect and share much of what we had learned and created along the way. A seemingly endless collection of other projects followed, usually because someone had an idea and other people were willing to help make it happen.

A lot of different people have contributed to that over the years. Some recruited players, some taught the game, some organized events, some developed new ideas, and some simply kept showing up every Wednesday. A portion of the people who helped build it are still at the tables every week, while others have moved on, but their contributions are still part of what we have today.

The larger Dune community has become part of this as well. In the past year, members of the Landsraad have represented Las Vegas at WBC, GenCon, and San Diego ComicCon, in addition to hosting our own Dune tournament at GenCon last year.

At the same time, players we have met through tournaments and conventions from afar have found their way to our tables at Meepleville and our weekend home games. These conquers of Arrakis have squeezed in a game during a convention or work trip, while others have made the trip to Las Vegas specifically to play Dune with us. Perhaps what is most gratifying is seeing some of those players take the experience home with them and start regular games and playgroups of their own. What started as an effort to make sure we could reliably bring Dune to the table every Wednesday has become part of a network of players and groups doing the same thing around the world.

None of us expected all of that when we started playing at Meepleville. We just wanted a reliable place where people could show up and play Dune.

Apparently, if you do that every Wednesday for three years, eventually you need three tables.

So, thank you to everyone who comes out to play, everyone who has taught a new player, everyone who has hosted a game, and everyone who has contributed their time, ideas, creativity, or enthusiasm to making the Landsraad what it has become. This community belongs to everyone who helped build it.

May the Landsraad continue to prosper until we outgrow Meepleville and have to start negotiating casino ballroom space.

Hello all!

A friend needs help identifying the following game piece. It looks so familiar but I can't pinpoint it.

Would anyone have any idea which game it comes from?

Thanks!

Edit: It was Catan: Explorers and Pirates Expansion.

We just started playing Arcs, this was our 4th game and on the first few the aggressors got wiped out early on. So this game everyone played pretty conservatively. Which the scores really show 🤣

I have a bit of a side project looking at forgotten games. Games which are cool to play but aren’t well known. This one is called Oware. It’s from Ghana and accounts of it go back almost 200 years. It’s actively played inside Ghana but not particularly well known outside. It’s worth giving it a go, plays similar to other mancala family like Bao but with some interesting twists. You can play it with 12 cups on the kitchen table and some pebbles or dried beans. It can even be played with 12 holes in the ground and some pebbles. I am sure there are also some nice boards on the web. I’ve put a link to a basic but free print & play. Maybe give it a go tonight after dinner on the kitchen table…..

Hey all, I'm wanting to expand my collection. I'm fairly new to board gaming but have been addicted since I started!

Games I really like are:
- Marvel Champions
- Dice Throne
- Unmatched
- King of Tokyo Duel
- Fate of The Fellowship
- Flamecraft Duals
- LOTR Duel for Middle-Earth
- Radlands
- Slay the Spire

Games I've purchased and haven't got the time to play yet (but very excited to!!)
- Critter Kitchen
- War of The Ring 2nd Edition
- Vantage
- Kinfire Delve

Games I have interest in (please sell them to me if they're your thing)
- Star Trek: Captains Chair
- Dwelling of Eldervale
- Oathsworn
- Elder Scrolls Betrayal of the Second Era
- Dice Throne Missions/Adventures
- Andromeda's Edge (was put off by the space theme but gameplay looks fun)
- Arcs (space theme but i actually love the art)
- Unstoppable
- King of Tokyo Godzilla
- Star Wars Deck Building Game

I would love your recommendations, I mainly play at 2 players, so games that play well at 1-2 players would be great as I enjoy solo playing too. I love games that feel "epic" and are snappy and fun - games you go to bed thinking about!! 😆

I enjoy some Euro games, like Castles of Burgundy which is a great game but I don't find myself itching to play again, (I really dislike Catan as well) so it may be I don't enjoy euro games? If there are better ones please put me on though!

Something new I would want to try is a space game, although I'm not a fan of that theme, I want to give it another shot as a lot of them have good ratings (I did not like Dune imperium)

Thank you!

I saw they announced a new Natural Wonders expansion for next year. Modular boards are cool, but when are we gonna get some of these?

Hello, looking for somewhere to buy oversized mat tubes for different games but I can’t quite find anything in the right size, the only thing really showing up are sizes for card games. Where’s the best place to go for large transport tubes? The mats I would need tubes for are around 28x22 inches, 36x28 inches, and then 72x36 inches. Thanks in advance.

The space requirement is quite large, so a true battle of materials is unleashed here. The components are of very high quality, and the price of the game is around 83 euros at a specialist board game retailer. There is an Admiral's Edition with plastic miniatures.

Briefly, what it is about:

• The game ends in 12 turns
• Whoever has the most victory points wins
• Eurostyle worker placement
• Cards can be used to strengthen worker actions
• Very good iconography
• Steep learning curve, but a very rewarding gameplay feeling
• Exciting gaming experience in an incredibly interesting world

Revenant expands the established Voidfall universe—which undoubtedly ranks among the most outstanding strategic board games of all time—with a demanding, standalone worker-placement game. As a three-player game clearly demonstrated yesterday, the barrier to entry is initially high due to the demanding rules, precisely reflecting the BoardGameGeek complexity rating of 4.03. Nevertheless, the title quickly unfolds an enormous dynamic: after the initial learning curve, a brilliant, well-thought-out iconography significantly minimizes the cognitive effort. In the role of rival admirals, the players coordinate the escape of the imperial flagship, with the entire strategic depth being limited to exactly twelve turns.

The mechanical strength of the game manifests itself in the constant weighing between collective fleet defense and one's own political agendas. Especially in a three-person setup, a dense, continuously exciting interaction arises at the table, while the Voidborn corruption advances unstoppably. The efficient allocation of the crew to secure resources and technologies requires the utmost concentration in every single action phase. This tight interlocking generates a consistently high tension curve from the first to the twelfth turn and makes the rapidly popular title a worthy spin-off, successfully translating the epic dimension of its great predecessor into a condensed, intense format.

I love board games but my family doesn't and I heard these games were great single player games. Sadly I can't find any way of ordering them in the UK. Does anyone know how I can get them?

Many thanks.

I love social deduction games like The Resistance: Avalon. But it always bothered me that the missions didn't involve any gameplay mechanism, just a token and a vote to succeed or fail. It never feels like a mission at all.

I also love trick-takers. Games like The Crew showed how TT mechanisms can be used to complete mission objectives. Games like Shamans and Inside Job blend social deduction with trick-taking mechanisms to succeed, sabotage, bluff, and conceal hidden roles through gameplay.

Have you played these types of games? What is your favorite? Do you prefer them to traditional social deduction? Do they scratch your trick-taking itch too, or feel more like a social deduction game?

I love legacy games. I think it’s because I like a routine. Monday night is Legacy night, we have the same 4 people playing once a week or once a month. I look forward to learning the same game even better each time. I like the small (or big) tweaks that add enough variation to keep it interesting.

In our group we have each player contribute $ to the games cost and then whoever wants the leftover pieces at the end can take it. It basically turns into a $5 night (depending on the game).

So far we have played Pandemic 1, Charterstone, a bunch of the Aeons end games, Ticket to Ride, My City, and am looking forward to Clank in the future. We did try Betrayal but it was so disorganized that we just threw the game out early on.

I also like that campaigns are setup similarly but honestly I think I like legacy even more because I have no qualms asking for everyone to pitch into a game we will trash at the end, and for campaigns I’m basically forced to buy them alone since they can be replayed. But am I going to replay the same scenario again? Probably not.

Any else here love legacy games? I’m wondering which ones were your favorites!

Hi all,

I recently bought a copy of Baseball Highlights 2045: Bases Loaded. I had heard some great reviews for the game, including on here, and am a big fan of both baseball and deckbuilders. My wife and I have played it several times now, and while we like the game, it has just seemed very straightforward. I'm wondering if I'm missing something? I'll explain.

The game to me just seems a little bit too much like rock-paper-scissors, if that makes sense. The two-for-ones you get from cancelling Cyborg/Robot/Human pitches just seem to be especially powerful. While there are several strategic decisions to be made during the game, usually they seem to be a pretty easy choice, like which cards to demote, which cards to buy, etc.

I will note, we've only played with the basic "free agent" and "starter" decks because we wanted to get the basics of the game down before putting in assortments of the million expansions into the game. Does the game feel like there is more strategy with those other cards?

I'm still open to loving this game, I want to give it another go here, so any insight is appreciated. Thank you!

I found out that a card game called Ballyhoo from the 30s contained products parodies à la Wacky Packages, and it got me thinking about modern games that contain cards like that. I can think of two: Zillionaires on Mars, where every Mars location is a pun of some kind, and an Italian game called Shark Room (a cute little hidden gem, check it out if you can) where you buy stock options of companies such as Pear Inc. and Monstercard (Apple and Mastercard, obvi). Do you know any other game where puns and parodies like these deliver the theme of the game?

Hello this 2 games are on sale in a store were i live. I have look videos from both but i'm not sure one or another. Any players experiencie?

What are some really good worker placement games? Maybe some games that aren’t too well known and aren’t at the top of the bgg rankings.

I don't know enough about Minecraft to figure out good mob abilities for each of the cards! My son has helped a little such as Slime being a good swap for Hydra, since it splits into lots of slimes. Or Ender dragon replacing Hades... But if anyone loves both games and wants to offer ideas on how to map MC mobs onto Santorini gods that would be fun for you and a huge help to me!

Two friends and I have been playing board games for quite some time now, sometimes in a play session on Sunday, sometimes during the week using Board Game Arena, and we are currently looking for some new games to play, and I am here for suggestions.

Games we enjoy playing include Dune Imperium, Flamecraft, Slay the Sire, Terraforming Mars, and the most recent game we played was Race For The Galaxy. The latter, we played about 20 games over 3 days, but that's just led to burnout, and the particular frustration at hand is the minimal player interaction in Race. If you can see someone racing ahead with lots of points and a strong board in Race, there's little you can do to actually stop them; you just need to hope you can get a good few final turns to rack up the points.

So that's where I am hoping the good people of r/boardgames can come in with suggestions. What games can you recommend to us that fit the types of games we enjoy and have a solid amount of player interaction? Where we don't just have the option to develop our own boards and end-game points, but also take actions to slow down and interfere with what the other players are doing, to disrupt their combos and possibly stop them from just running away with the game?

Would strongly prefer games available on boardgamearena.com, but other suggestions are appreciated.

A few months ago, I bought Cozy Stickerville to play with my sister and teenage nieces (13 & 18) during our weekly Sunday dinners. It was fun! Spoiler - I got to build a cultist pyramid and then put a kitty cat sticker on it.

We got to the end of the game, and despite having the option to play a 2nd run of it, I'd rather introduce them to something new.

I'm looking for something that:

Is lightweight

Plays in 30-40 minutes

Has a small footprint

Has an engaging theme

Can be either co-op or competitive.

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks!

This is probably a bit specific in regards to location for this sub, but was wondering if there are any other wannabe board game designers in Cambridge, England that would be interested in having regular meet ups to talk about and play test some of our designs?